The grasses in the driveway are long and unruly at this time of year. They scratch through my trousers as I walk. The path seems to go on and on in this heat. Where had Ma got the money to buy so much land? Auntie Kavitha told me that the man who sold her the land was only selling in ten-acre plots. ‘She asked my advice and I told her she was mad for thinking she could live out there by herself. But she got that land for a song.’

When we turn the corner it’s as if we’ve stumbled into someone else’s property. There is a group of people – men, women, children – rags of people, dark and bent over in the grass. A few of them straighten themselves to look at us. I turn to Mallika, bewildered. ‘Now who the hell are these people? What are they doing and where have they come from?’

‘They look like Adivasis,’ she says, walking boisterously up to them. I stay behind. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but her body language is exercising authority.

‘And?’ I ask, when she returns. The people have resumed whatever they were doing, faces turned back towards the dirt.

‘What I thought. They are Adivasis. They’re looking for mice.’

‘Mice?’

‘To eat,’ she says, simply.

As we walk past them, one of the men looks at me. His face is gutted and wrinkled, his ribs sharp as scalpels. He’s wearing a dirty dhoti, out of which two of the skinniest, bandiest legs plant themselves on the earth. He rubs his stomach and brings his fingers to his mouth in the shape of a closed flower. It is a gesture of begging or thanks, I do not know, but I cannot react to it.

‘Come,’ I say to Mallika. ‘I must speak with Valluvan.’

Chapter 18

18

You know those sleeps when all your fears cram into the centre of your head and you’re forced to contemplate the certainty that you will not only lose everyone you love but that you’ll grow old alone and die in a troublesome way? Despair that begins inside the body – along the byways of arms and legs, the arteries and veins pumping blood vociferously, moving haplessly in the direction of disaster. Or perhaps nothing is intuition. Perhaps it is all retroactive premonition?

The day we lose the first of our dogs, I wake to that kind of morning.

First there is the smell of burning. A sharp, rancid smell of something giving way. It comes from the west, from the shuttered windows behind my bed. I wonder whether Mallika is setting another snake on fire, or if it’s something more horrible – the house catching fire, a gas leak.